'Concerning: request for erased and ‘blurry’ photographs', still from the testimony of Witness F, pointing to a photograph in the courtroom of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, 2015 - ongoing, installation, dimensions variable

The long-term and heavily researched projects of Anna Dasović question the role of documents and testaments that relate to wars and violent conflicts in recent history. The production and use of (visual) documents are examined in their quest for truth finding and the social and political perceptions they seek to form, while simultaneously examining their legislative and archival ability to cope with trauma caused by violence. Here, the archive serves both as a physical place for these documents and a metaphor of collective humiliation and remorse.

Her current research questions the role of representation around the genocide that occurred in Srebrenica during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995, arguing that most representations replicate the gaze of the perpetrator. The frame is revealed as an essential part of the materiality of violence, rather than merely being its representation. Dasović examines the historical and aesthetic figure of the erasure and its potential to represent the process of a double elimination: the elimination of the people in Srebrenica and the erasure of the traces of their elimination.

Dasović reveals different levels of hesitation in the political and aesthetic representation of Srebrenica itself, despite being the most thoroughly researched and documented genocide in the world to date.
(MM)